Kendrick’s music is just as edgy as his attitude – peppered with dissonant clusters and off-the-changes melody lines, punctuated by crashes from his powerful left hand. On a new album, Dance World Dance (Verve), he writes with Ellington-like lushness for a lit-tle big band, unveils catchy tunes reminiscent of Thelonious Monk and raises holy hell in the spirit of Sun Ra. A minimalist, he pushes clashing chords against each other with simple voicings. He decided early on, he says, that it was no use trying to ““out beat’’ every piano monster in New York. What evolved was a style so unusual that it’s remarkable Kendrick scored a major-label contract at all. Credit is due the French producer Jean-Philippe Allard, who has reached across the Atlantic, often rescuing careers in the process, to assemble a stable of adventuresome composers: Randy Weston, Abbey Lincoln, Charlie Haden and, now, Ornette Coleman among them. ““I thought it was great to have somebody who doesn’t follow the crowd,’’ Allard says.
Kendrick’s path to the deal was a jazz classic. In the beginning, there was gospel: a musical family rooted in a Florida Pentecostal church, a childhood spent behind an organ ““watching my mama shout and pray.’’ On a dare from his pianist father, he abandoned funk at the age of 21 to study in New York with Barry Harris, an apostle of be-bop. After a period of slavishly copying Harris’s recorded solos, he immersed himself so deeply in the music of Monk that some of his peers started calling him ““Monk Man.’’ In recent years he and a close friend, cornet player Graham Haynes, have been drawn to the music of Africa and of Weston, a sometime resident of Tangier.
Steadily, the gigs have improved. For the last three years, Kendrick has been with singer Lincoln, an artist who likes to wing it. For his next record, he promises some even more ““bugged out’’ tunes. But while Kendrick may eschew the high-church posing of some of his contemporaries, his ballast always is spirituality. ““I’ve got some gospel stuff where you can see the ushers coming down the aisles,’’ he says. The question remains whether he can bring paying customers into the record stores and clubs. In any case, he says he won’t bend to try. ““I don’t know what’s going to happen with me and Rodney, but one thing is sure – we’re not afraid to take chances with the music,’’ says Haynes, whose eclectic new record, ““The Griot’s Footsteps,’’ will be released in January. And whatever happens in the marketplace, they won’t have failed jazz.
